A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (20 page)

“Our interest in it is greater now than at any time since our Holy One departed Palija Kadi.”

“Return it, slut!”

“Not even to save ourselves—for we wouldn’t be saved at all. Do what you think you must, j’gosfi pervert. Whatever you do, you will do through the combined wills of Seitaba Mwezahbe and Duagahvi Gaidu.”

“The combined wills!” Emahpre said. “What Sh’gaidu vomit are you attempting to serve up to us now?”

The Pledgechild spat two words—“
Smai donj!
”—and clasped her hands.

Outraged, Emahpre lifted the urn to shoulder height, thrust it out, and dropped it. It shattered, kicking out a cloud of glittering green dust. Shards whirled across the floor in every direction.

“
Smai donj!
”
the Pledgechild said more vehemently.

But Emahpre was playing to Seth. “For however long Magistrate Vrai continues to suffer the absence of his birthright, we will periodically escort one of your midwives into the rain. Do you understand?”

“
Smai donj!
”

“It’s time for one to go now, Pledgechild.” Emahpre said, and a pair of soldiers neared the midwives and lifted to her feet a woman to the Pledgechild’s right. Swinging their victim about, the dragoons walked her past Seth tauntingly.

He could not intervene. An anonymous martyrdom on Trope would mean nothing to any of these people. He could die for himself, for the sake of his own integrity—but right now that seemed an overheroic and downright fatuous course. It was premature. He waved bitterly at the Deputy, lowered his head, and stalked toward the rooms behind Palija Dait.

“Where are you going, Latimer?”

“To join the Magistrate and Master Douin behind the wall, for I don’t intend to watch this.”

“You have my personal invitation to remain.”

“
Smai donj!
” Seth said, disdainful of his own bravado. On the edge of fury, he beheld the frail midwife stagger into the rain between her executioners.

As Emahpre, mock-scandalized by Seth’s Tropish curse, drummed the fingers of his hands against his breast bone, Seth marched into the first claustrophobic room behind Palija Dait. Here, leaning against a wall, he expelled a tense breath. His heart thudded. But something inside him was different. With a start, he realized that the telepathic choiring of the Sh’gaidu in the galleries had ceased. What remained was the droning of the midwives and those few adult Sh’gaidu who occupied the benches in the nave: a sensation like music drifting into audibility from a long way off.

When Seth looked up, Lijadu stood before him. She had come into the room as soundlessly as snow.

“They’re killing my sisters, Kahl Latimer.”

“Your people killed Lord Pors.”

They locked eyes. Facing her, trying to brave the accusation of her bruises and her pitiless gaze, Seth wrestled with his torment. Lijadu had wronged him by her theft of the dascra
,
which act had precipitated the chaotic events of last night and this morning. Wasn’t she at least as responsible as he for everything that had happened? The whole, crazy tapestry of provocation, reprisal, counter-reprisal, and systematic slaughter was senseless. It got crazier and more tangled as it unraveled, and Seth could not see the point. Not of any of it.

“Damn it, Lijadu, why did you do it?”

“They’ve gassed the Sh’gaidu in the galleries. They’ve put them out of their minds on their feet.”

“
Why did you do it?
”
he insisted.

“I took what was ours, Kahl Latimer. Nothing more.”

“It’s only symbolically yours! Surely, you don’t claim sole ownership of the birth treasure of the Tropish Magistrate. Surely, you must have known Emahpre would use the theft to justify this horror.”

“They’re killing my people.”

“Exactly. It’s maddening, Lijadu. Everything about this is maddening.”

“Get the Magistrate, Kahl Latimer. Have him stop it.” Like a wraith, she vanished beyond him into the Sh’vaij: Emahpre’s slaughterhouse.

When Seth arrived in the tiny room where the Magistrate had sequestered himself, he found Clefrabbes Douin in a chair asleep and the ruler of Trope staring at the ceiling with uncovered eyes. His goggles hung limply from his left hand, which dangled off the side of the bench like a dead man’s. His eyes were pale diamonds.

“Magistrate,” Seth said.

Douin awoke, and the Magistrate tilted his head to see who had spoken. Then, slowly, he sat up, making no effort to cover his eyes.

“Have you abdicated to Emahpre entirely?” Seth challenged him.

“You see me naked, Kahl Latimer. This is who I am. I’m helpless to be anything but what I am.”

“Despite all the vested authority of the state? Despite a half dozen auxiliary births? I thought you could be anything you wished.”

“The Pledgechild’s heir has stolen my identity.”

“Emahpre is
killing
people, Magistrate.”

Douin, who had found his ministerial cap, put it on his head, picked up an effects kit that Seth recognized as Lord Pors’s, and struggled to his feet. Clutching the kit under his arm, he went to the Magistrate and raised him as if lifting a statue to an unsteady pedestal. It amazed Seth how tractable Vrai had become. Maybe Lijadu had in fact stolen his identity—in a gut-deep, psychological way that defied understanding.

“We’re going out there,” Douin said. “This is our fault, Lord Pors’s and my own, and we must stop the killing.”

“I’m bereft of power,” Vrai protested—but, with Seth’s assistance, Douin headed him out the door and through the suite of cells toward the Sh’vaij. At every step, the Magistrate chanted his powerlessness, his absence of identity.

Upon entering the building’s nave, they saw Lijadu against the left-hand wall, just ahead of them, staring into a pair of laser rifles. The dragoons who had drawn down on her stood several meters away, near Deputy Emahpre, who had sent another midwife into the rain since Seth’s departure and who continued to conduct this impromptu pogrom like a maestro afire with self-importance.

“She’s confessed she has the amulet,” the Deputy said. “See—it’s in her hand.”

Lijadu held the dascra
aloft, the dascra
for which her people had already suffered several deaths and the ignominy of gassing in Yaji Tropei.

“She insists she’ll scatter its jinalma
if we approach her,” Emahpre went on, affecting a calm he clearly did not feel. Then he caught sight of Vrai’s naked face and cried, “Magistrate—!”

Vrai shrugged off Douin’s and Seth’s supporting arms and approached Lijadu, his hand extended. “That’s mine,” he said. “Return it to me, and you have my word that no representative of the state—no j’gosfi—will ever set foot in Palija Kadi again. Do you understand?”

Although initially mesmerized by the Magistrate’s naked gaze, Lijadu shook off this paralysis, stepped toward the ring of midwives, and with a graceful, underhand motion pitched the amulet to the Pledgechild. It landed in her lap, and every set of eyes and rifle barrel in the Sh’vaij swiveled toward her. She lifted the dascra
in
cupped hands, cherishing its weight and feel. The Magistrate moved uncertainly toward her, interposing himself between the prayer ring and the state’s armed dragoons

“I’m too old to travel to another world,” the Pledgechild said, glancing sidelong at Douin and Seth. “But perhaps the Sh’gaidu younger than I will find the Holy One there, in her spirit if not her flesh. Perhaps we were foolish to try to recover what we could of her in this world, since we are few and our strength is in our souls and not our arms.”

“Pledgechild—” the Magistrate said.

Emahpre shouted something curt and high-pitched in Tropish.

“I’ve been too long without the solace of my birth-parent’s eyes,” the Pledgechild said, and she broke the Magistrate’s amulet against her chest. Then she pulled the pouch along the inside of her left arm, switched hands, and pulled it along the slack flesh of her right arm. Indeed, she ground
jinalma
into her body, summoning the plush crimson of her blood: crimson.

We are all imperfect isohets of the same perfect progenitor. . . .

“I’m both the reader and the reading of Ifragsli’s final vision,” the old woman said. The empty amulet had fallen into her lap. She lifted her arms to the ceiling and let the blood flow down.

Horrified, the Deputy, the Magistrate, and all the state’s soldiers watched. Lijadu, meanwhile, crossed to the Pledgechild, knelt before her, and laid her head on one of the bleeding woman’s gnarled knees.

“I here appoint Lijadu as my successor, Kahl Latimer,” the Pledgechild said. “In the islands of our exile, she will lead the Sh’gaidu to communion with our Holy One and so redeem us even on that strange world.”

Lijadu argued briefly with the Pledgechild in the Sh’gaidu dialect. Otherwise, she appeared in total control of herself, as if she had foreseen all that had happened since her return to the nave of the Sh’vaij.

Somewhat recovered, Vrai stumbled forward and knelt beside Lijadu. Seth and Douin hurried to him and tried to lift him to his feet. He would have none of it, though, and shook himself free. He put his face directly before that of the dying old woman, whom Lijadu was now struggling to support. Meanwhile, the Pledgechild’s mottled head lolled toward one shoulder as if broken at the neck.

The Magistrate whispered, “Dear slut, you’ve deprived both of us of our heritage. My amulet contained the jinalma
of your Holy One.”

“I know,” the Pledgechild wheezed, her eyes incongruously asparkle. “Hence the theft and hence my dying here in Palija Kadi: home. Home, Ulgraji Vrai.”

“How could you know?” the Magistrate asked. “How?”

The midwives around the Pledgechild cleared a space and Lijadu eased her dying benefactor to the floor. As the Magistrate, Seth, and Douin looked on, Emahpre directed his soldiers to escort the midwives to the trucks waiting to evacuate them and their sisters out of the basin.

“No more deaths!” Seth shouted at the Deputy.

“You don’t want damaged goods, do you, Latimer? You don’t want your capital depleted.”

“Emahpre—”

“No worry of that now. Our search is over. The responsibility for the debacle is all yours.” The Deputy, too, left the Sh’vaij, apparently to assist with truck assignments and loading. The rain had begun to abate, but the gloom in the building gave no sign of departing with it. Seth stood isolated and defeated.

“Our Holy One has come home,” the prostrate Pledgechild said, the fire going out of her eyes. “She’s come home. . . .”

It took her a while to die, but the exact moment of her death identified itself when the last faint droning of the Sh’gaidu mind cries ceased and a terrible stillness fell over the world.

Later, a pair of dragoons carried the Pledgechild’s body to a waiting truck and laid it in a preservation cylinder for transport to Ebsu Ebsa, the nearest of the Thirty-three Cities, and eventually off-planet with her people. Neither Seth nor Clefrabbes Douin had anything to do with this business, for they’d gone into the fields to join Deputy Emahpre and several other soldiers in examining the wreckage of The Albatross for the corpses of Huspre and Lord Pors.

In the remorseless drizzle that had supplanted the rain, this party worked for over an hour and a half without success. Huspre’s body was extracted from the caved-in pilot’s bubble, but no one found any sign that Porchaddos Pors had also been aboard until a bewildered dragoon turned up the Point Marcher’s surrogates—his false teeth—on the topmost terrace.

But what had happened to the body? Had it been flung into another dimension? Or diced into so many pieces that no one could find them all? This was a great mystery. Perhaps Huspre had done something sinister to Lord Pors’s corpse before boosting The Albatross aloft. . . .

“I must return to Feln with only a name for the body,” Douin said despairingly. “The Point Marcher is lost.”

Emahpre assured Douin that his soldiers would keep searching. He explained that since Huspre had destroyed their transportation back to the tablerock, they must ride to Ebsu Ebsa in a truck, like the Sh’gaidu evacuees, and transfer from there to an airship suitable for the return trip to Ardaja Huru. This would be an inconvenience, but perhaps not a horrible discomfort. Later, the state would have the Sh’gaidu lifted into orbit aboard a series of shuttles. The
Dharmakaya w
ould take the evacuees and convey them through The Sublime to their promised land on the southern coast of Kier.

“They don’t want to go,” Seth said.

“Their wishes are now immaterial,” Emahpre said. “Even the Pledgechild, before she killed herself, saw fit to anoint her heir with the burden of leadership on Gla Taus. That, Latimer, was because she knew the Sh’gaidu would be leaving Trope.”

Sick of the Deputy, the drizzle, and his own complicity in this affair, Seth was about to protest when Douin said:

“Did you hear the Magistrate tell the old woman that his amulet had contained the jinalma
of Gaidu?”

“I heard.” But the Deputy did not like the subject. He wiped his wet forehead with a wet sleeve and kept hiking down-basin with his typical angry jauntiness.

“Why would he tell her that?” Douin asked. “Was it to intensify the Pledgechild’s problematical guilt for ordering the dascra
stolen?”

Emahpre halted and faced Douin. “What the Magistrate said was nonsense, a forgivable lapse. He could not accept that his birth treasure was forever lost to him. He tried to project the loss onto the Pledgechild. It was all a fabrication, a fabrication he was helpless to avoid.”

“And the Pledgechild trumped him with a fabrication of her own?” Douin asked. “Is that it?”

“I suppose so. When Gaidu vanished, the Magistrate—who was not then Ulgraji Vrai but a j’gosfi named Ulvri in his fifth evo-step—carried the dascra
of his natural birth-parent. That’s one aspect of a Tropiard’s life that never alters through all the various watersheds of his personal evolution.” Emahpre set off again, forcing Seth and Douin to keep up with his herky-jerky pace.

Breathlessly, Seth asked, “Was the dascra
really the Magistrate’s? Could Lijadu have substituted another for it?”

“If it wasn’t his,” Emahpre said, halting again, “the damage is nevertheless done. We’ll never recover the real one.”